Photo© Arno Paul Plaisirs inconnus made its Paris premiere at the Palais de Chaillot in January 2019. At one point the performers come just to the point where skin galvanism makes lovers remember that resistance starts where desire flowers Karine frowned as, to hide her doubt, she looked down into her wine glass. The wine was white. This was after ten in the evening. As I see it, nightmare’s original recipe. She took a false sip. She’s never been crazy, so she never does really understand how terrifyingly uncomfortable living in one’s skin may be. Though usually on the money, the importance of some things may escape her. We were meeting for a drink at la Comète, whose street sign looks like the emoji; I had just seen the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine’s Plaisirs inconnus (https://vimeo.com/269886819), (something like “Fresh pleasures”), at Palais de Chaillot – the Théâtre National de Danse. The idea of the piece was to put the accent on the performance (and its dancers) by hiding the names of the programs’s five well-known choreographers as well as its stage, lighting and costume designers. The Ballet’s artistic director Petter Jacobsson says that anonymity reduces the affect of expectation. Onlookers might be able to renew the pleasure of first meeting with the choreographers by meeting them anew in the dancers. I counted nine segments in one hour and fifteen minutes of program; at beginning and end, the stage was bisected with a thick check transparent plastic curtain of contemporary colors; otherwise light. The idea seemed to add depth and breadth to the stage: a lot of womb space for the performance. Unlike many people around me seemed to, I didn’t recognize any choreographic style and did not feel teased. But then I never can do. I never can put my finger on the music either, even the most well known. Anyhow, I said to Karine as I sat down, the river is never twice: live performance is to get the new as new is made in the mix of performers, place, set, onlookers, weather and the crowd on the streets bus and metro. What seemed to me to be a mocking Bolero was really nice, because the humor let some real sensuality filter through – why Bolero, a march suitable to snappy uniforms, jackboots and feral shouts, is considered erotic has always been beyond me. A march recalls us to duty, perhaps, when we are bloody sick of our usual sex partner? But, “Karine”, I said, just as my pint was delivered to the table, “The very best segment of the dance for me was three couples, two slightly in the back and one in front – Perhaps it was a tribute to American musical-style dance? Made me think of that”. The hands and arms of the front couple came so close as they sought each other that I thought, Well, that’s really as close as you ever get, isn’t it? “Just to the point where skin galvanism makes potential lovers... Continue reading

- Photo ©Joachim Olaya Marion Lévy has perhaps invented a new comic commonplace: “Pursue that excellence, Pangloss!” I hope she has. Without the antidote of laughter, Panglossism will kill us more surely than the ungainly truths it always seeks to deny.Training, by Marion Lévy, was presented by the Festival Faits d’hiver at the Carreau du Temple in January 2019 And too much of nothing
/Can make a man a liar /It can 'cause one man to sleep on nails
/It can 'cause others to eat fire
/Everybody's doin' somethin'
/I heard it in a dream
/But when there's too much of nothing
/It just makes a fella mean/Say hello to Valerie,/Say hello to Karine/ send them all my salary on the waters of oblivion. – Too Much of Nothing, Bob Dylan (Peter, Paul & Mary) Marion Lévy’s Training performance piece doesn’t have enough monologue to be stand up but is physical enough for comedy; it’s in the lineage of silent film, Charlie Chaplin tossing and twirling that globe or Buster Keaton putting up that Sears Roebuck house – when the body had to tell a story as well as act as a foil for emotions other than desire. I went walking with Karine last Sunday – Beelzebub, can she promenade! Last Sunday alone, arm-in-arm under more than occasional douches of freezing rain, from the Eiffel Tower rive gauche to the Institut du Monde Arabe then from Pont Marie rive droite to the Eiffel Tower. AlI along the route we took, we clung to each other; I clung to Karine. Sometimes, Karine laid her head on my shoulder. The cloud of her hair was delicious. She has recently changed it from silver blonde to jet black; it is brittler than ever: little shards of it mixed in the needle-sharp freezing spray pissing into my face from the grey grey cap of boiling cloud above. When I forced myself to look up, used my eyes, took the glacial rain in my face, I saw that cracks and fissures on high tore out a thin ragged line of horizon back lit in neon-white. When I finally could, I told Karine that when I saw that pale light once before long ago, I decided to stay here forever. Karine replied that she wants to live forever, though she added that it isn’t very likely. I put my arm around her waste and pulled her as close as I could. This vigorous, almost mad, walk provoked thoughts of my upbringing. I was shaped a Panglossian Positivist. A Panglossian forces him- or herself to believe – and righteously forces others to believe – that everything is going for the best in the best of all possible worlds, that there is nothing behind the curtain and that, if some impetuous little dog proves the contrary, the humbug that puffs and stiffens the great and powerful Oz is meant only for my good. Contrary to what you might think, Panglossianism is tough-minded and unforgiving in proportion as everything must be just fine. Panglossism denies... Continue reading

Photo: Sydney Dance Theater Cheng Tsung-lung’s lovely "Full Moon" at the Palais de Chaillot was part of the Sydney Dance Theater’s performance 2018 offer. As an experience, Cheng’s performance is as brilliant a non-verbal version of the dream-essences of Midsummer Night’s Dream as a spectator is likely to find Some years ago, when I first knew her, Karine leaned a little across the table we were at and asked me if I thought of her as different. She and I didn’t share culture or nationality or gender or background experience. Is that difference? I won’t say she coquettishly shook back her tight blond curls when she said it; I won’t say that when I hear “difference” I am ready to think some sort of demand for special consideration is on the way. The right to bore me, for instance, or the right to speak frankly about my failings. But also, I loved Karine. Above all, that the woman knows that, for me, our hearts beat as one. I told her, No, I didn’t think her different. She exploded with indignation, demanding, yes, demanding, that I take into account her difference. Was she about to end our relation? A claim of difference is really a claim for a different relation, right? Difference means changing the relations of the all the subjects and objects involved: Karine and me, for example, or me and anybody, or anybody and everybody or everyone and everybody. Also, when are we not different? When is there no difference? When we are dead, when we are all truly equal, that’s when. I saw Gluck’s Orpheus & Eurydice the other day. It underlined the point. The glory of Hell is its un-differentiation. No bumps or hard edges in the underworld. That smooth homogeneity of death is why Gluck’s Eurydice is reluctant to leave without some assurance that Orpheus’ love will soften the 400 coups of the new life to come. A “Chinese approach”, I thought – genre, “moon above hills”, where the onlooker contemplates the object’s essential identity through its multiple and diverse reproduction When I regained countenance, I pretended to listen intently. I grabbed her hand – and a fine, dry, cool hygienic-soap-roughened hand Karine’s hand is. Yegods! I clumsily rasped it across my unshaven cheek. I swore that difference was all my study. But aside from knowing that uncountable differences establish Karine’s being and mine, I don’t know much, really. Except maybe now that expecting difference might, as may all expectation, mislead. The terrible moment of Karine’s demand for difference, the KDD, came to mind when – quite by chance – I saw Cheng Tsung-lung’s lovely Full Moon at the Palais de Chaillot last year, as part of the Sydney Dance Theater’s offering. I was at the time – quite deliberately – researching millennial choreographer Yu-Ju Lin, trying to understand Sponge, her first piece to get wide attention in Europe. Sponge was a featured piece at Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales en Seine Saint-Denis 2018. Thumbing through the program,... Continue reading

Cold Blood: Photo©JulienLambert03122015-JL-5187.jpg It turns out that “You don’t need language to understand it” about a performance piece is just as true as that other cliché I once doubted, “He done drank himself to death”. I learned the refulgent truth of the latter just recently, when my friend Udo cashed out, and that of the former, when I saw Michèle Anne de Mey & Jaco van Dormael’s Cold Blood at La Scala Paris. To acquire truth, both clichés require real-time application of a thorough mastery of storyline, stage mechanics, scenario and direction by cast and management. The thing itself must be of a piece from start to finish. For his part, Udo had a snoot full from the moment when nobody could any longer knock the bottle out from between his lips right up to the moment he groaned, slipped his fleshless hand under the sweat-soaked pillow, scrabbled for the greasy flask that held sweet liquor’s most fatal drop, gulped with bobbing Adam’s apple and promptly shuffled off the mortal coil: He done drank himself to death”. The cast and direction of Cold Blood get it as right as Udo. Each and every body and every thing and every gesture of the performance enables each cast member to seamlessly shine in synchrony with all the rest. As with Udo, it’s impossible to tell where idea-special effects-, originators; light-, set-, machine-designers and directors, performers, technicians and stage hands begin or end their collective exercises. It’s all of a single piece, a seamless execution of intent, right up to denouement, which surpasses Udo’s in that all players walk away with an appetite. Cold Blood: Photo©JulienLambert-JL-8201.jpg “You don’t need language to understand it”: Seamless means wordlessly effective as well as “of a piece”. Thomas Gunzig’s text rings like one of those storied tolling bells from Cold Blood’s complex ballet of Lego & Hollywood. Players, performers, dolly guys, hands, managers, cameras, projectors, boom microphones, special effects, multi-mini-sets, hand-work and cinematography show the seven ways to die as effectively as a prayer book might lay out the seven deadly sins. You don’t need words to understand Cold Blood any more than you need them to understand whether your dance partner fits your arms or not. Succeeding on every level, including the French language, hypnosis, understanding of mid-20th century esthetics and special effects, irony, literary theory & practice, dancing, acting and knowing what really counts in life, Cold Blood is the second in a performance triptych directed by Anne de Mey & Jaco van Dormael at La Scala Paris, following on Kiss & Cry and to be followed by Amor. All three pieces have had previous international success. In featuring performances skillfully inventive enough to be unclassifiable and unclassifiable enough to go beyond entertainment and entertaining enough to really enchant an audience, La Scala Paris, which opened last year, is shaping up as one good place to see contemporary performance at its best. You can also eat dinner there. Hope it’s a trend. Cold Blood, directed... Continue reading

Photo©Martin Argyroglo From “Forme Simple”, around the Goldberg variations by performer, choreographer and professor Loïc Touzé at the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson I’ve always liked the expression haut comme trois pommes. It means “rather (darlingly) little”. Haut comme trois pommes –three apples high – always comes to my mind with little kids, the ones between one-and a half or two and four – just learning the basics of troubling the world with long stares, grunts of restless effort, crawling, grabbing, stumbling, holding, walking, a regard, a coo that becomes a burble that becomes a brook that becomes a stream that becomes a river of words that becomes, splash, whizz-bang: a person. A person haut comme trois pommes. Sometimes, these little pommes are of a noos not canny, something I was reminded of when I was sitting at a picnic table at the Cartoucherie – in June? I was waiting to see a dance performance put on by the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson. It must have been June, because at the Cartoucherie, formerly a gunpowder and bullet factory situated behind the Parc floral de Paris and made famous by Ariane Mnouchkine’s innovative Théâtre du Soleil, I – or you – can sit outside under the trees, eat and drink nice food and build a good time. The Atelier de Paris’ different stages and studios are dug and plugged into or shared with the Cartoucherie. The Cartoucherie, formerly a gunpowder and bullet factory situated behind the Parc floral de Paris, houses the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson. A little bit of country at the end of the city bus line Also, before the program begins, you can hone your powers of observation by staring at people. Honing my own powers of observation is how I happened to see the flaming-red-haired kid haut comme trois pommes, Hans im Glück – straight out of Grimm. Honestly, at hardly two-foot tall, Lucky Hans was too small to join with the mixed group of pre-teens and daddies on the make-do soccer field away to the right. All on his own, this prodigy of human development was positively riding a full-size soccer ball through rough grass and battered playground stuff. Memory! I could only have observed Lucky Hans outside in nice weather, so I was certainly at the Atelier for last year’s edition of the annual June Events dance performance program. Was it maybe for Daniel Léveillé’s Quatuor Tristesse? Or Loïc Touzé’s Forme Simple? Hard to say. Last year, for instance, over a bit fewer than 30 days, June Events featured more than 100 dance and musical performers and presented 30 creations, 16 of them new. The Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carlson, currently under the direction of Anne Sauvage, took up residence at the Cartoucherie in 1999. Since its founding, it has become a key player in dance performance development. As coordinating organization for Paris Réseau Dance, it collaborates creatively with dance and performance innovators at Etoile du Nord, the Regard du cygne studio and MICADANCE-ADDP. Photo©RaphaëlStora From “Cellule”... Continue reading

"La Petite Collection" 2018 exhibition of original post-card size miniatures by contemporary French visual artists takes place from 6 to 15 December at Galerie Bertrand Grimont, 42-44 rue de Montmorency 75002 Paris. Works from La Petite Collection 4ème Edition and previous shows can be seen and purchased on the web. See the links below - Artist: Pat Andrea In past times, when la Joyeuse Fête wasn’t just Karine and I getting as sloppy as politeness will bear on other people’s liquor and dancing in New Year at a German opera, my son Boo’s enthusiasm for progress and self-improvement would sometimes flag. In such moments of childish despair, I would wag my index finger gravely and say to my sweet boy, “Soft trousers, Boo. Soft trousers, man”. He would laugh and buck right up, as if I’d popped a Sugar Puff Blaster into that cute little cupid-bow bouche. “Soft trousers” is our way of naming "true progress". It was our little joke then, as it still is now. It comes from reading Raymond Briggs’ Ug: Boy Genius of the Stone Age. Briggs is also the author of that sublime Winter’s Tale, The Snowman. Ug, the boy genius, was the first to see that soft trousers would be a vast improvement over stone trousers. Lucky for us. How then in stone trousers would we dance Salsa? And what would tailors be? As well as lifting and soothing Boo’s progress-and-improve blues, Ug also commented my own childhood without my having to utter a single word. This interested my Boo, you bet. Achieving soft trousers requires genius and good humor, certainly, but, especially, a vision and footwork. Artist: Nathalie Sizaret Artist: Anahaita Masoudi Giving potential art-buyers an opportunity to look at a wide but manageable variety of the visual work of artists that gallerists, exhibitors and fellow creators think are the best on the market, Florence Lucas’ La Petite Collection has achieved soft trousers in the realm of appreciating and buying visual art. Artist: Caroline Ballet Each Petite Collection creator produces two 10cm x 15cm (4- by 6-inch) originals that sell for an affordable 150€ apiece. And, as over its three previous years, the Petite Collection will this year present examples of work by not fewer than 100 contemporary visual artists in postcard format. A complete list of contributors figures at the end of the article. Artist: Rachel Marks Creator contributors are selected by Lucas who, with the help of friends and colleagues, puts together a list of the best work encountered at galleries and exhibitions during the year past. She makes her call for contributions in Spring. Artist: Daniel Otero Torres Contributors may be entirely new on the scene or have already shown. New or established artist or not, the selection process means that artists are effectively vetted twice – by the gallerist or exhibition curator, as well by Lucas. Lucas says she makes her choice of Artist: Célia Coette contributors on what she calls the “interest” of their work in terms of... Continue reading

Photo: “Evol” © Herman Sorgeloos “Evol”– an anagram of “love” which also recalls “evolution” – shares the love of the bodies of the dancers and the beauty of their movements … [The Angels] see cleary that [Humans] are not really at home in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains some tree on a slope, that we can see again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street, and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed. First Duino Elegy, Rainier Marie Rilke (A. S. Kline) “There is something of Giselle in it,” said I to Karine, darkly, after seeing Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”) the other evening at the Espace Cardin. It’s not that I object to the hokey melodrama; neither Karine nor I are strangers to inconvenient evolutions of affection, god knows. Emotive incontinence or problematic pregnancy, either, for that matter. But. I meant to tell her that Giselle or Verklärte Nacht or most other ballet-classic dance pieces use the body to tell a story rather than using the body so that it tells some-body’s story. So, I think the need to tell Verklärte Nacht’s story – de Keersmaeker wrote the choreography for the music, after all – means that the fluidity of Samantha van Wissen’s modern-dance expressionism (of bodily feeling and emotion) must necessarily stumble over Schoenberg’s made-just-for-ballet-style melodrama. Photo: “Verklärte Nacht”, Courtesy Festival d’Automne She’s pregnant by one man but loves another. But what’s hers will be his says the beloved. Since the whole strength of Claire Croizé’s Evol – which opened at the Théâtre de la Bastille not too terribly long ago – is that the some-bodies tell themselves, there’s no worry of expression stumbling over a story. The art in Croizé’s choreography is in keeping the way wide enough for improvisation that works as performance; she does that. Inspired by Rainier Marie Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which hold that a human being exists outside of thought, belief, tradition, philosophy and religion, Croizé says the idea behind Evol - an anagram of “love” which also recalls “evolution” - is “to share the love of the bodies of the dancers and the beauty of their movements”. As Evol goes forward, sometimes accompanied by music from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, sometimes by silence, performers improvise personal movement that expresses their different personalities. Evol opens with the cast spreading itself in a diagonal line, back corner to front corner, across the stage, giving the impression of a spray of salt or of flower petals. Two women performers – I identified them as “Blue” and “Grey” in my notes – detach. They remain non-positioning in respect to each other as they dance silence, though it does seem that Grey uses her body as a semaphore from go; from this begins an almost by-the-numbers introduction of personalities, of some-bodies. I was struck by what seemed an almost continuous signaling and semaphoring, although it Hands and arms point and wave more than propel... Continue reading

In hip hop, the cultural power of African-America has combined the radical politics of Thomas Jefferson with the radical humanism of Ralph Waldo Emerson to create the first true universal citizens living out a first truly global culture. Continue reading

Photo: Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations As in any virtual amusement park, Mr & Ms Public must take a ticket and patiently wait their turn to ride Simon Fujiwara’s empathy machine, now at Lafayette Anticipations in the Marais Move over Woody Allen. An empathy machine, pictured above, trumps the filmmaker's celebrated Banana's orgasmatron, at least as an opening image for Simon Fujiwara’s Revolution installations at Lafayette Anticipations’ new spaces in the Marais, which run until the first week of January 2019. Fujiwara's machine, actually called Empathy1 simulator, and installed on the ground floor of the building, is complementary to three installations on two upper floors. Each installation points and questions the volume and ubiquity of images and image technology and the representation of self. All are esthetic and emotional successes. Such success is certainly owing to Fujiwara’s effective execution of his concepts and intentions but also I think to the very skillful configuration of the building’s modular space: there is an extra-fine touch at work in light and surface, in empty and full, in distance, dimension and position. Revolution is a first solo show in France for Fujiwara - a multidisciplinary artist who has worked at the Tate and MOMA, as well as in Berlin & Tokyo - and follows on an earlier collaboration with the foundation and Centre Pompidou. Empathy 1, constructed by a simulation-equipment manufacturer on the artist’s concept, is a real sit-down-strap-in experience that uses YouTube footage, amusement park ride-like movement, strobe, rushing air and splashing water to create a simulation of life that is “truer than Disney”, I heard Fujiwara say, and which he describes as a “sculptural experience”: riders find it fun. The installations upstairs include a Happiness Museum, which breaks down happiness to data and artefacts, a still and film presentation of a certain Joanne Salley, and, on the top floor, a wax figure representing Anne Frank. Salley is a former art teacher of Fujiwara whose career was ruined when some British tabloid published pictures of her with her breasts exposed; Anne Frank is of course one of the most moving symbols of the horror of the Shoah. Photo: Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations Joanne Salley lost control of her image when a tabloid published photos of her with her breasts uncovered. She is determined to get it back and rebrand Fashionista-style photo posters fixed to a sort of raised platform or plinth hide as much as they reveal the energetic, classy, athletic, lovely, lively, cool, etc., etc., etc. Joanne Salley they depict. Embedded behind this… monument(?) … is a screen showing a continuous loop documentary, featuring Salley, of Salley’s effort to regain control of Salley’s image, an image that came to control Salley; no victim, Salley’s determined to recapture the “Salley brand”. The documentary’s story line carries you through this latter irony and pushes you on to the uncomfortable realization that indiscreet breast handling in the 21st century will get an unwary female punished, severely (and didn’t it recently happen to a competitor at a world-level tennis... Continue reading

Karine says Slow Walk is meditation; Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker says walking is her dance; Kata says we dance because we are otherwise alone. Cute shoes As part of the Festival d’Automne’s tribute to her work, the choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker led a “Slow Walk” – actually five walks of about three-quarters of a mile over four hours from different points around the Place de la République, the rally point – a place Karine and I haven’t seriously been since the popular rally for liberal values following the appalling 2015 mass murders here in Paris. Since it costs nothing and requires a unique human skill, walking always speaks to us. So, this past Sunday, first day of Fall, ‘though it was mostly raining in that sudden, voluminous, gatling-gun way it rains these days, we went in for a Slow Walk. For de Keersmaeker, a Slow Walk is “Just walk. Slow down the rhythm and rediscover your joints, your pulse, your weight and slip into another relationship with time and movement”. Most Slow Walkers translated de Keersmaeker’s idea, as Karine did, as a very slow, deliberate step, one foot in front of the other, at a pace 16-times slower than an average one. Karine says a Slow Walk is a meditation. I didn’t look at it this way, though; I live to move and move to live; standing still is not my usual way to understanding. Also, I no longer do anything that makes me uncomfortable, like stand in the rain, unless the payback is way above real or analogous minimum wage, or there’s just no help for it. The slogan of the Slow Walk was “My walking is my dance”. I chose to translate that into a Slow Walk in the way any other cheerful four-year old would: by moving my butt in a way I hoped would attract attention, chatting up strangers and as often as possible sloughing off to get cake and ice cream and out of the rain. Once all of us diverse and differently-abled slow walkers had arrived at the Place de la République, the rain stopped. The sky cleared slightly, even, and, standing beneath the monumental statue of Marianne and her friends Liberté, Egalité Fraternité, de Keersmaeker gave us a dance lesson: had us running this way and that way, fast and slow, hopping, flailing and stretching across the square. When de Keersmaeker had us all warmed up, we danced both rainlessly and brainlessly together for a bit under an hour. A big change from last time, but not so much of one as you might think. Then, as the rain began again, we all quickly scattered to the four metros and homeward. At home, I found a note from Kata. Since she has been back in Japan, she wrote, she has been thinking about Why do we dance? She had one possible response; she wanted to share it. “We dance because we long to see our friends‘ perspectives,” she wrote. “We cannot experience... Continue reading

Performing over better than three hours, LNI never, ever, slipped into any other mode than iconic… Mes absences sont du sentiment - “Christine” – Christine & the Queens Multidisciplinary artist LNI’s Le Baiser de la pute/Kiss of the whore performance piece, which I experienced at FRASQ#2 performance art program last summer at the Générateur de Gentilly, is a good illustration of how a performance piece can impose itself as any other work of art can: through a combination of right theme, right action, right time, right place. As a person who can’t, or won’t, sit peacefully at home – I have many brothers and sisters in this family I think – it might be said of us that we liked LNI’s piece because it gave us something to do in the evening. Or because we are ferocious. Or because I’m a dirty old man. Or because Karine is a cougar. True enough in one respect. If not gadding the evening away out and about, I lie restless and disgruntled on the couch. True, she busies herself, furious, damn her. I furiously jiggle my legs more than usual as she works out her désoeuvrement by swiping at stuff with a rag dangling from the tips of her long, dry, strong, sharply nailed, fingers, what she calls “tidying” but is really self-medication. Poor woman, brought up girl. And my désoeuvrement does not cry out to her, “Be still thou unquiet heart!” seize and plunge those long, hard fingers into my raging flesh. Instead, brought up boy, poor man, my mind’s eye begins contemplating in the smear of unwashed windows the heavier fecal matter of what’s left of our nasty, short and brutish lives as they sink toward the unclean bottom of this overheated, under-oxygenated gutter we absurdly call a life. In such circumstances, it is far, far better to take each other by the hand and boldly venture into the world of performance art. Is it not? Unstill lives apart, the whole truth is that – my girl and me – we like performance art because a one-time live performance like LNI’s Le Baiser has the same potential esthetic depth as Tristan and Isolde or The Nightwatch. LNI is able to perfectly project the heart and soul of one of those Catholic devotional cards Deliberately not hemmed in by a lot of conventional or customary constraints, as are more formal modern and contemporary genres, live performance art is always a lot more accessible, which is one of the reasons why I suppose it’s developed so much over the last 50 years or so. The uniqueness inherent in the ephemerality of live performance generally – Tristan or Le Baiser and especially “performance art” – “events”, “happenings” and “situations”, indeed, any un-nameable, bound-and-determined Queen-Elizabeth look-alike setting fire to a brace of milk-fed pink kittens – lends all performance, including “performance art” intrinsic value. But the particular value of performance art is not just in its uniqueness but also its performance: Tatsachen (“fact” in German)... Continue reading

Photo: Children at the Opéra Garnier, October 2018 Just before the show began the man loomed up over the children perched in the rows just ahead and below. They squirmed around to look. He told them, “‘Decadance’ is divided into several parts. See which part makes you dream. Then, after, tell us your dream.” They snapped back to watch to show For the premiere of Ohad Naharin’s Decadance at the Opéra Garnier, we perched in the fourth balcony, right, fourth row, a very good value proposition if your eyes are still sharp, as ours are. Lacing together figures and themes from a variety of other works and interpreted by some of the world’s most professional and best classical dancers, Decadance showcases Naharin’s “Gaga” approach to dance performance. Photo: Aurélien Houette rehearsing, 2018 © Julien Benhamou / Opéra National de Paris Performers has to learn the Gaga dance dialect for Ohad Naharin’s “Decadance”. Gaga, observed Aurelien Houette, a 20-year veteran of the ballet, connects “the material and physical with energy, with the immaterial and imaginary” Naharin believes movement is the universal language of universal values: Gaga is his dialect. Opéra cast dancers had to learn Gaga for the performance. A distinct ruffle rippled through the sharp-eyed dance-lovers already in rank, when about 20 sweetly excited children ranging from 6 to 10 took up most of the seats in the rows below. One of the adults who was with them, a teacher, we suppose, said they were the young studies from the Opéra ballet school. Continue reading

the arms are the motor of a body that joins the movement of liberty, becoming: jump, turn, again and again “Violin Phase” (1981) is the first of the four 15-minute segments of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s first professionally-recognized work. The piece was staged as part of the Festival d'Automne's tribute to the choreographer's oeuvre, as well as Lafayette Anticipations' start-up Echelle Humaine dance festival. a body, nothing-nowhere: jump, turn, again and again De Keersmaeker had intended to dance it herself in the modulable spaces created in Lafayette Anticipations building, on an un-raised black-mat type platform carefully covered in very white sand and set on the ground floor in a well made by three wrap-around balconies. Her idea, she said, was to (use her own body to) renew the piece in light of 37 years of experience of listening, a body that dares: jump, turn, dare again dare again a body that breaks out bit by bit, ecstasy: jump, turn, again and again rehearsing and performing. a body that dares, gets born: jump, turn, again and again Yuika Hashimoto, a member of de Keersmaeker’s Rosas dance troupe, traces of “Violin Phase”, 15 September 2018, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris performed in de Keersmaker's stead, in light of her own experience. As her performance showed, Hashimoto is a performer of great precision in gesture and of emotional power in movement. spiral I was on the first balcony facing the stage entry area, my back to a heavy square pillar, so Hashimoto was in my direct line of sight, slightly right of my center. As her darting feet drew a sand-dollar? or a turn again lotus? or a rose? or a spiral? I felt Hashimoto's concentration on her body in my own belly, as when my fingers draw negligently along Karine’s spine. As I rose saw Karine look at me with a question, I saw in Hashimoto’s dance a tableau: nothing-nowhere, birth, ecstasy, become. Karine, looking, felt, she said, "a body that dares, a body that breaks out bit by bit by bit to join the movement of liberty". Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker When Hashimoto had taken her bows, as the white sand was swept away, de Keersmaeker came out Yuiki Hashimoto to talk. This was not scheduled but it apparently happened at all three performances. She explained that a fall from a horse clipped her wings and as she explained, favoring strongly her left shoulder, in the traces of white sand on the black platform, the side-lined dancer scuffed out the sand-dollar? lotus? rose? spiral? figure performing "Violin Phase" creates. rose window sand dollar For this first of her pieces, de Keersmaeker said, looking up into and around the balconies, she had wanted to start at the beginning of dance, like a kid: jump, turn and wave the hands: do that again and again. So, with the arms as motor “Violin Phase” does just so: jump, turn, repeat and let loose the natural variation of... Continue reading

Circle within circles (1923) I left Cindy Van Acker’s “Zaoum” thinking of Kandinsky… and… Cindy Van Acker is thought one of the moving spirits in the transmuting of abstractions into dance performance gold and Zaoum, featured at Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales 2018, is an avatar. Zaoum works like one of those constructivist paintings of lines and triangles on a piece of wood or cardboard, forcing the spectator into a Baroque Mass of feeling and meaning. Lyubov Popova’s stage plan for Vsevolod Meyerhold's “The Magnanimous Cuckold” (1922) … Also thinking that "Zaoum" works up a stage to contain and shape, rather than facilitate, concept, choreography & music… and… From the beginning to end Zaoum played on my senses as pictures at an exhibition. It is expressionist in performance, evocative in music, constructionist in set. My eye senses the presence of Klimt, Franz Marc, Gontcharova, Lyubov Popova and Kandinsky – artists whom I know and who all point outside from speech to a language of intuitions and unique or personal meanings, I think, rather than sign and gesture. Memory and intelligence construct meanings and perspectives: symbols from postures, legends from physical tropes. … Also the hustling geometries and decorative use of script of Natalia Gontcharova, by the way, one of the main scene painters for Diaghilev’s Ballets russes … and… The Cyclist (1913) “Zaoum” is the name Russian Futurists gave to their “pure sound” poetry, “za” beyond and “oum” mind. Van Acker remarks in her notes that zaoum points her vision of dance as “a force of possibility, liberation and life”. In Zaoum, choreography plays against scenography to evoke mood or stoke the sense; building a strong link between set esthetic and choreography concept seems one of Van Acker’s trademark abilities, as the mix of set geometry and slow body movement in Lanx (2008), or most other of her pieces, suggests. The choreography is accompanied by Luigi Nono’s 1982 Quando stanno morendo. Diario polacco N. 2 (“While they die. Polish Diary”), a tribute to and remembrance of Poland’s Solidarity worker’s movement, dissolved by a Soviet-inspired military coup d’état in 1981. Zaoum is intensely visual, for both the outer and the inner eyes. Die großen blauen Pferde – Big blue horses (1911) … Also Franz Marc can transmogrify brush-strokes and primary color into pure sensuality, into Baroque masses of meaning and … To remind spectator eyes that black is a not a color but the absence of light, the auditorium is plunged into absolute darkness. As well as by a strange vocalization, the blackness is penetrated by apparently body-less limbs suspended in space. The black space also suggests itself as a sea, perhaps Hades’ sea is black and slick, like a gout of raw petroleum. The black waves propel the dance forward into a space that radiates intense white light from above and below, a sort of waffle iron. The dancers arrive as couples, one of whom becomes boneless and seemingly lifeless. An amplifying manipulation from an animate partner seems to awaken the lifeless... Continue reading

Quand elle sera, elle aussi, aussi fluide que cette eau, Et elle aura, elle, le geste de cette fille, sur le banc, celle-là, Qui hoche la tête, qui parle, chuchote presque. A sa sœur ? Inviterai-je ta machine à table avec le chat le chimpanzé et autres des miens. Il y a hâte ? When that machine has the fluidity of water in this carafe And the look and moment of that girl there, with her drink, The one shaking her head, talking soft and intense. To a sister? I’ll ask the cat and the goldfish, the ape, too, to pull it out a chair. Is it important? Continue reading

Photo © Agathe Poupeney / Opéra national de Paris Crystal Pite "Season’s Canon" is brilliant, a combination of dance professionalism and choreography that always lines up with the underlying sense of the piece “It used to be that the scene faded out when people decided to have sex”, I told our table partners, making sure to send a dark look in Karine’s direction – I’m never quite sure how the woman might take my gassing. Worse still, hers often turns out to be an understanding closer to the truth than my own. “Fading sex out of the picture and saying it was happening has been dam’ useful”. I leered at ‘em in Flashman style, putting a glass of vino to my smacking lips. I went on to say that putting aside the broader truth that there can be no unfortunate or costly errors of appreciation in the dark, sexual fade-out killed at least three other birds with a single, inexpensive, consensual hallucination. Sexual fade-out allowed intellectuals and actors to think themselves racy and avant-garde, satisfied the censors’ guild as to their liberalism and titillated the spectator. All without challenging a single attitude. Of course, today’s “fade in” techniques – actually, “unfading out” –, in which lots of irrelevant but apparently sex-related stuff is played upon the stage, challenges no attitudes either. I mean “attitude” in the sense of trajectory adjustments, as for a rocket launcher or tank barrel, but applied to the human psyche: “Attitude, n., 15th c., Late Latin, “aptitudo”, tech., term of art: mental geometry relative to the projection of belief, value, idea, thought & action into the real world. “Jesus God, Mrs. Robinson”, Benjamin Braddock might have exclaimed had the show’s producers heard seen the drawing, “That sucker is really big!” – Image originally published 23 March 2017, by Céline Misiego, "La Chronique féministe" It’s the beginning of the 2018-19 school year and a ministerial circular is reminding school principals that the 2001 law requiring three “sexuality” classes a year in each school grade has not been implemented. Its opponents are able to raise a furore by claiming schools will “teach masturbation”. Science & Avenir pointed out in its summer issue that the only publically available correct anatomical drawing of a clitoris appeared in a French middle-school text book in 2017 (Wikipedia says a first correct anatomical drawing appeared in 1844). Cynic that I have been made out to be, I fear that even a real anatomical drawing of a real clitoris won’t change any social attitudes, or the human trajectory, even if it’s in an approved textbook, even published in Wikipedia and even for those, apparently few, who have had actual sex with actual women, even for individual masturbating females, victims of a liberal educational system. Believe it as you will, but I’ve been thinking of all this because Karine and I were to see a four-bill show at the Opéra Palais Garnier*. The show was opened by James Thierrée’s Frolons, sustained by Ivan Pérez’ The... Continue reading

[FRASQ] #10, “Rencontre de la performance”, begins its 10th year of multidisciplinary performance at the Générateur in Gentilly from 6 to 20 October 2018, it's worth a bus ride, let alone a mass. Photo©BertrandBousquet FRASQ is a circus of senses and intentions. The aim of the requirement for intelligent non-creativity and up-to-the-last-second fluidity is to renew the performance. In the 400 square meter open space of the Générateur, performers and onlookers are crowded together (but not pell-mell) and must take account of contents, intentions and medias and their own physical positions and mental postures … and each other Chloé Silbano, a painter of the ineffable details of human movement also has a taste for then making somehow apt performances around them. She invited me to see one her oddly apt events at an event called FRASQ#2 at a place called the Générateur in a place called Gentilly, which kisses the bottom of the 13th arrondissement in the far south. Gentilly, strangely, is directly linked to the Porte de Bagnolet in the north east by the 57 bus, hardly any walking involved. Also, Silbano’s performances tend to radiate a sort of butter-won’t-melt-in-her-mouth humor that tickles as much as perplexes me. So I went. Wine, Sir! More wine! Photo©ChloéSilbano Chloé Silbano paints the ineffable details of human movements. She invited me to FRASQ#2 performance event at the Générateur in Gentilly, near which kisses the bottom of the 13th arrondissement and is no worse for it This astonishing 57 bus brings those passengers boarding in the northeast and who might just wish it, to, virtually, in front of the Générateur. Unsurprisingly, I’ve realized, if one but adds 5+7, one obtains the number 12, which of course denotes Shiva’s divine aspects and is of course divisible into four groups of three, which of course is the number of the mystery of the one true God. The Générateur, formerly a movie theater called the Gaîté-Palace, is brainchild of choreographer and dancer Anne Dreyfus and painter and entrepreneur Bernard Bousquet, who turned into a minimalist performing arts space in 2006. Their idea is an open-door, independent and artist-run venue where performing, visual, plastic arts, theater and poetry can freely mix and match. The FRASQ performances, first put together in 2009, are, with a range of other events and exhibitions, fruit of more than ten years’ effort. Photo©BertrandBousquet It’s true. This infinite sample of possibility provided by Coline Joufflineau proves beyond a doubt that every little thing is different A frasque is an “escapade”, associated with the sense of “flabby” or “flaccid,” suggesting unfinished work or work that doesn’t meet expectations: “Ray-gun, indeed, Ms. So-Called Inventor. Why, it hardly slows up even the drunks.” I mention the etymology not because I am a Monday evening etymologist but because FRASQ takes a “happening” approach to performance. Performers are asked to show the “undone” or, as one might say, “not yet hardened”, and also “not to worry about making art”, creating out of savoir-faire but also out of their... Continue reading

The memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir, but not La Deuxième Sexe (“The Second Sex”), for which she is best-known and honored around the globe, were added in May 2018. It is impossible to say why. Continue reading

Historical etymology! What a marvelous sump of self-satisfying instruction! Badaud, the French word for “gawker”. Give it here. We can say it comes from the late Latin for “largely open”, then “yawn”, then through Provençale, “gawker”. The Sunday afternoon logic of it all is both pleasingly moralizing and cynical, suggesting, as it may, that curious on-looking is slack-jawed idleness and that openness is no virtue. But times have advanced since the Middle Ages. With gun and camera, today’s entertainment possibilities go well beyond beating mules and simpletons. In the age of choice, the stakes are high, too. The idle and open may now choose between the darkly-thrilling hope that a sharp click and sudden crack turn a muddy quarrel into limpid homicide or an unexpected performance. For instance, painter and performance artist Chloé Silbano’s Simile, visual free verse around a watch, time and a guy. Behind the church of Saint Julien des Pauvres, parallel to the Seine, tethered to a perfect long-evening on a stony delta cut out from the otherwise narrow rue de la Bûcherie, at n°5, in front of Alma espace d’art gallery, a well-built, self-possessed guy in a blank sandwich board sits still on a short-leg sawhorse bench. The man wears a magic-marker time piece that shows just after ten. The custom time piece had been charmingly designed out of public gaze by Chloé Silbano. Chloé Silbano is a thin, almost spindly, woman with a pile of red hair and a camera squatted taking the pictures here declaimed, a claim, a stake in fame. A person is master of their doings, so the law says. Before the marker ink has even properly dried, the guy rubs the watch face. It fades beneath the touch. Using the woman’s own magic marker, off his own bat, the man adds a bit to her design. Time passes. Just a bit. The man wets his big fingers. He dirties his hand, the fleshy hump of his palm; the small crowd can't see it, though, and his fingers blacken: ten has disappeared into the grown smear. The photograph shows that as Silbano photographs the woman’s short jeans have shown the worsted flower patterns of her stockings through the whole time. Some people can’t resist a free drink. But the small crowd has now dispersed. Continue reading

Photo©Max Vaduk Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in an early performance of her groundbreaking "Violin Phase", part of her larger work "Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich" (1982) Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge and, both inventor of a model of the whole universe and refugee from a political nightmare, he would have known. That’s why, at least here at a sticky table at the Bal perdu café, dance – once subordinate to music and mere complement to the eternal word – is important, why choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is my Fall newsmaker of choice, with a wide variety of her performances figuring in the Fall Paris Performance Calendar The Paris Festival d’Automne (a “biography” of which features in The Best American Poetry, March 14, 2018) this year honors de Keersmaeker as a dancer and choreographer, giving an attentive spectator the opportunity to recognize her contribution to the promotion of the “movement arts” – dance, dance-performance – a contribution that will grow and flourish as new, diverse, performing artists come to maturity in coming years. A quick glance at the creative collaborations and performers on view in the festival’s offer shows that de Keersmaeker is as much a determined activist and promoter of dance and movement performance as she is a dancer and choreographer. Photo© Paula Court Andros Zins-Browne, an alumnus of P.A.R.T.S, performing "Already Unmade" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017. The creation figures in the Festival d'Automne's Portrait of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker program. Herself an alumna of Maurice Béjart’s Ecole Mudra, the seedbed of contemporary dance-performance in Europe, de Keersmaeker is the founder of the dance performance school P.A.R.T.S (Performing Arts Research & Training Studios, Brussels). With alumni and teachers such as Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Salva Sanchis, both in view in Paris’ Fall 2018 season, and, just off the top of my head, diverse others such as Noé Soulier, Daniel Linehan or Boris Charmantz, whose work goes well beyond de Keersmaeker’s own choreographic practice, P.A.R.T.S is a seedbed for contemporary dance and performance. Known for pure vivacity in movement and geometrical precision in spectacle and today a fixture in Europe’s dance-performance firmament, de Keersmaeker, who was born, brought up and is still based in Belgium, has said that music taught her everything. Keersmaeker debuted as a choreographer in 1980 with Asch but came to notice in 1982 with a choreography in dialogue with Steve Reich’s processive suite of Piano Phase, Come Out, Violin Phase and Clapping Music. De Keersmaeker founded her Rosas dance company in 1983, concomitant with her celebrated Rosas danst Rosas piece, whose ability to generate passion from abstract minimalist gesture and repetition has made it a milestone in post-modern choreography. Since the beginning of her career, de Keersmaeker has sought to develop a distinctive, what I call, “co-expressive”, choreography with polyphony, classical, atonal, jazz and rock, from the late medieval Ars subtilor (En attendant, 2010) to Bach (Mitten wir im Leben sind, 2017)... Continue reading

“Oranges and lemons say the bells of Saint Clements … Here comes a grinding machine to grind down your head!” The iconography has changed a lot since the 40s – 50s. The older edition of Orwell’s dystopian farce features a naked man (who somehow seems to wear leotards) confronted with a giant cog-thing that suggests a machine. In those days, when many felt machine culture would smooth off all the angles that made us us, “Where do I fit and how do I fit there?” was the question to answer. Sometimes, I wish those grinding machines had succeeded, don’t you? I was on my way to see Karine for lunch for the first time in quite some time. I am arhythmically tapping my foot to the soundless poprock of my Apple-brand Walkman, twitching nervously through the throwaway newspaper. I appreciate the horoscope and read the one for each of the people I love who love me plus two for me – believe me, not many, so I have time for the squibs before my stop, Glacière – “icebox”, the stop for la Santé, the legendary prison, which is just up the way from the establishment where she sometimes works. By the way, the design of the original la Sante building is based on Bentham’s Panopticon: its architecture is meant to aid inmate rehabilitation by keeping them in solitary confinement and under continuous surveillance, a Utilitarian conceit called the “Philadelphia System”. In May, a squib cried, Gallimard, the legendary French-language literary publisher, would bring out a new, updated edition of George Orwell’s 1984, translated by Josée Kamoun. The squib cited changes such as “neoparler” for “novlangue” for “newspeak” and other new neologisms for Orwell’s coinages, as well as use of the present tense instead of the literary-narrative imparfait. I got the impression that, somehow or another, the new publication, at 14€ Kindle, had used translation to “update” the text, like, say, a new English translation might throw light on some facet of Proust’s dense humorous prose; after all, reading Henry James in French is like reading a fresh-baked James, a pain au chocolat at coffee, topping off a strawberry jam-smeared muffin at breakfast. Alas, my electronic reader does not yet even read my books for me, let alone compare and analyze them, so I can make only a weakly and partial assessment; ultimate judgment is still up to me. So, although Kamoun has a finer sense of farce and is a better writer than the historic translator, Amélie Audiberti, she, Kamoun, has not been able to raise up an updated, new or improved 1984 from the timber of la langue de Proust. The new 1984 is just a same-old same-old translation with the great fault of all translation everywhere: since the translator can never have the original author’s knowledge and experience or his or her sense of lexical nuance, it’s never really anything more than a distorted mirror of the original. So, for example, in this Kamoun version, as in the... Continue reading

PERFORMANCES & CREATORS TO WATCH features reviewed dance pieces, dance-performances and performances, along with short biographies of associated choreographers, performers and other actors. It complements the Paris Performance Calendar's AGENDA & PERFORMERS headings. It is regularly updated. PERFORMANCES MY SOUL IS MY VISA • Marco Berrettini • 70 min • MC93 - Nouvelle salle • Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales, May 2018 • Α My soul is my Visa plays on the spontaneity of live interaction ... Continue reading

"Les Enfants du 209, Rue Saint Maur, Paris Xème", directed by Ruth Zylberman is as absorbing as that wonderful Italian cinematic opera di saponi, La meglio gioventù, (The Best of Youth), directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli The warm days are de retour. The other day, not far from where rue Saint Maur runs into the avenue Parmentier, I sat down for coffee with two women acquaintance, Orsola and Corinne. In the course of friendly chatting in which I was diligently, we could even say, desperately, trying to please, politics came up. My face reddened, strong knot tightened in my stomach; I suddenly needed to bite, to scratch, to maul, to run down and kill. It may very well be, it certainly is, that my political phobias are true phobias and that I am right but my feeling was all down to my Aunt Helen. She is why I always want to please people of the woman persuasion, maybe even why I search them out for company. Also, I share a lot of my emotional makeup with her. Aunt Helen was a beautiful woman, ‘though, for the life of me, I can not recall her hair or eye color or whether she was tall and thin or short and squat. But I can feel her in my bones. I can smell her farm-kitchen scent and hear her breathily ahtaahlkin’… Aunt Helen’s was a womanly bosom where I was a single and unique. I needed that. I feel her caress yet, the brush of her fingertips, now; I bathe in her warmth still, as I sit here. With such introduction, I think, did I early learn to love womanly company not my mother. Aunt Helen, actually one of several great aunts, with three handsome children and a fine, deferential husband, also constable of Somerset, was the youngest sister of her large, late-19th-century American family. As such, it was part of Yahweh’s design that Helen, daughter and sister, take care of her grandparents, parents, sisters and brothers, especially as they became infirm and like to die. This meet disposition of things, which proves that duty, especially family duty, is a great motivator of human affairs, is why Aunt Helen, otherwise a mere female, was nevertheless a landed magnate and a friendly-society bank. She had the family’s house and farm – parts of which were log and daub and others, stone, clapboard, brick and Queen Anne's lace. The family’s old and “nervous” – as we then referred to those in existential distress – found a home with Aunt Helen down at the farm. Also, Aunt Helen was, as the good old gods are my witness, 452nd iteration of her most imperturbable Queen of Misrule and Mistress sans pair of Liberty Hall. Surely more energetic than nervous and, as they then believed, more like to go on forever than die, grandchildren spent splendid summers there, soused with sassafras beer and rolling in homemade ice cream. Aunt Helen enjoyed... Continue reading

The wave is the primary choreographic trope of Lisbeth Gruwez’s exciting new dance piece. Photo©dannywillems18 THE SEA WITHIN • Lisbeth Gruwez, choreographer • Maarten Van Cauwenberghe, sound creation, with Elko Blijweert & Bjorn Eriksson • company Voetvolk vzw • Belgium Ω Performers, New Théâtre de Montreuil, May 2018: Ariadna Gironès Mata, Charlotte Petersen, Cherish Menzo, Dani Escarleth Pozo, Francesca Chiodi Latini, Jennifer Dubreuil, Liadain Herriott, Natalia Pieczuro, Sarah Klenes, Sophia Mage, Wei-Wei Lee / Lighting: Harry Cole / Scenography: Marie Szersnovicz / Costumes: Alexandra Sebbag Artist performance calendar From the sustained applause and the large number of folk lingering in the foyer to get a look at the Voetvolk troupe, it’s safe to say Lisbeth Gruwez’s The Sea Within is a public success. Sea, which premiered at the Nouveau théâtre de Montreuil as part of the Rencontres choréographiques internationales festival, is the Belgian choreographer’s first piece in which she doesn’t herself figure as performer, and remarkable for an especially intimate, sustained interplay of sound and choreography – an interplay for which her pieces are always notable. For Sea, Gruwez challenges herself to transmit through, essentially, words and looks, a very personal – very corporal – sense-vision without benefit of body. For me, thinking here in particular of It’s going to get worse and worse my friends, Gruwez is always reaching to use dance to transmit sense, a seamless mix of mind and body. So as Sea challenges Gruwez to get her sense-vision across by, as it were, talking and flailing her arms a lot, the 11 performers (10 women and Maarten Van Cauwenberghe’s Sound) are challenged to dance sense: force and passion enough, but also moral conviction enough, to deny the mind-body split. This is only a slight exaggeration. Gruwez is systematic as well as abstract in her thinking. In her note on The Sea Within, for instance, she writes that she is expressing the “tribal individual” – a concept borne out of her experience of zooming in on the pure individual in her recent Penelope piece (which she says has her turning round and round for 20 minutes), which then determined her to work on “human-scapes” rather than individuals. As I understand it, the “tribal individual” is a sort of e-pluribus unum psychic structure within each person and within which each person lives with others, a “tribality of being”, if you will. To put her sense-vision in motion, Gruwez’s choreography launches a pulse… something like a Fibonacci series which shapes as it swells along the course of the performance. The 10 performers in casual, individualizing postures and spread in the shadows around the three sides of the stage mat represent the condition in which a “prime mover” “just moves”. This “just movement” is visually tagged by the performer being the only person in a cast of strongly-built, expressive women to enjoy a milk-chocolate skin, a striking contrast that also suggests a distinctive warmth and sensuality; black is the color of the unknown unexplorable. Her movement – at first tentative,... Continue reading

AGENDA - SEPTEMBER, OCTOBER, NOVEMBER, DECEMBER Paris Performance Calendar is a work-in-progress “dance syllabus”, complemented by essays, articles and interviews from The Best American Poetry and other publications. Below are Paris Performance Calendar's AGENDA & VENUES, featuring selected upcoming or current shows. Click to consult PERFORMANCES & CREATORS TO WATCH, which features reviewed dance pieces, dance-performances and other performances, along with short biographies of associated choreo... Continue reading